DayZ

My goodness, what a few weeks. Ah well, IndieGraph (an indie games blog I wrote and once edited for) finally ended its run after getting hacked and basically temporarily shut down, and if you want to hear from the headman himself, here’s a great post from him that sums up our story. In any case, when it was closed, one interview never got finished and posted. It didn’t feel right to leave him hanging, and I thus had no choice but to post it here to fulfill said obligation and show this great game to the world. This inspired me. This blog needs more content, besides boring ol’ me rambling, so I decided to do this once or twice a month (depending on how I’m feeling), kind of like a recurring segment.

So without further ado, here I talk to SmashGames about his survival multiplayer platformer, Roguelands. It may be a bit out-of-date by now. Feedback, as always, is encouraged.

Q: Do you mind introducing yourself, SmashGames? Are you a team or one person?

A: My name is Sean Young, and I’m a senior at the University of Central Florida studying Computer Science. I founded SmashGames in January of this year, and so far it has been just me making games. I started out in the mobile scene with about 10 games but then decided to move to PC.

My very first PC game Magicite ended up being pretty successful after getting on Steam, so I definitely want to stick with PC for awhile and see what I can do better as a game designer and developer.

Q: What is Roguelands, in a nutshell? Is it well known what the disaster is, or is that up to interpretation?

A: Roguelands has only been in development for about three weeks now (POSTER’S NOTE: This is out of date now since this interview was done weeks ago anyway), so nothing is really set in stone. What I do know is that it will be a multiplayer RPG that is highly influenced by DayZ and Fallout.

Players will be able to create a game or join another one from a lobby, making things much easier to play with friends instead of the need for port-forwarding. The world will be procedurally generated with cities, farmlands, underground sewers, and much more! Players can then explore this world and try to survive by finding gear and loot, all while watching out for monsters and other players.

Roguelands should be on Steam Early Access hopefully in 3 to 4 months. It will most likely be $9.99 for PC, MAC, and LINUX!

Q: There’s some obvious DayZ-esque inspirations here, but is there any others? What are you planning on standing out with?

A: I’ve kind of become obsessed with DayZ recently, because it is so much more than just a zombie survival game. It isn’t flashy, is has an insane amount of bugs, and it is a hassle to find your friends and play with them. So why is it amazing? Because no other game has made me feel more stressed out or nervous when I see another player, and no other game has provided me with the same amount of satisfaction upon getting a kill. Any wrong move could be the end of you. I really wanted to capture that post apocalyptic setting with players not knowing if they could trust each other. I’m also a big fan of Fallout 3, and would like to implement some of the RPG elements into Roguelands!

Q: How is Unity to work with? Any strengths and weaknesses that stick out at you about the engine?

A: Unity is the only game engine I’ve worked with (aside from RPG Maker a long time ago) and it has been just amazing. There are so many tutorials online for everything and the community is very active. Since I haven’t tried any of the other big game engines I guess I can’t really provide comparisons. I don’t see myself changing engines anytime soon.

Q: How is coding the multiplayer aspect? Any problems? How do you plan to deal with hacking, cheating, etc.?

A: For Magicite, multiplayer made things really difficult. But now I have a lot more knowledge of how network coding works so things should be a lot smoother. Also, I’m using Photon for Roguelands so players will have an easy time finding a game in a lobby. As for cheating and stuff, I’ve got a few ideas for handling all of that but there definitely will be many testing phases before the official launch to prevent cheating as much as possible.

Q: Just quickly switching gears, what other games have you made, or are down the pipeline (that you’d like to point out)?

A: My very first game was a mobile infinite runner called Backyard Zombies. It kinda sucks but I think it is okay for a first game. Then I continued to make a few crappy mobile games, and eventually created a cool lane defense game called Pixel Kingdom. That actually had a Kickstarter campaign and raised over $5000! After that is when I moved to PC and madeMagicite, which has been way more successful than all of my other games. I hope everyone loves Roguelands even more!

Q: Do you have any parting thoughts? Thanks!

A: Thanks for having an interest in Roguelands. I will definitely keep the community updated on how the game is coming along with new pictures, gifs, and info!